Money For Grabs

According to our current analysis application fees have practically doubled this past year on the most popular, best deal fixed rate mortgages.

Fees for the best two year fixed deals around have increased in the last year from 995 on average to 1,400 over the past year. The cost of three year deals has also gone up from an average of 580 to nearly 1,150.

If you go back to last October when the base rate was 5.75% the average two year fixed deal was at 5.68%. The base rate is now 5% but the 2 year rate is still 5.57%. Three year fixed rate deals are also more expensive compared to the base rate. They have gone down from 5.84% to 5.65% in the same period.

After all the panic that’s occurred in recent weeks in the mortgage market lots of people may be tempted to grab the best deal they can and could wrongly focus on rates to exclusion of other considerations.

There could be a nasty shock when it comes to the fee which is charged as they have surely increased beyond proportion during the past year. What people should focus on is the true cost of their loan by taking into account fees as well.

There are still many good deals out there for people with substantial deposits or equity in their home and strong credit ratings. Unfortunately many people will not be eligible for them as lenders are increasingly taking a tougher line.

With Clients wishing to raise capitol intermediaries should now be changing their strategies for raising this money in light of the credit crunch. Also changes in the Consumer Credit Act have come into force and this means that a secured loan could probably be a better option than re-mortgaging.

These new changes changes to the act mean that all secured loans for residential purposes of any size come under the Consumer Credit Act and therefore every loan has to have a cooling off period, so the client is not pressured and an important factor is that early repayment charges are a maximum of two months interest depending when in the current month they notify the lender. When you add in that there are no upfront fees in the shape of application fees, booking fees and valuation and conveyancing costs then it’s pretty easy to work out that on a direct comparison secured loans work out to be better value for clients.

The whole point here is that if you are tied in to your current mortgage provider, in some cases even if you’re not, and wish to raise some money or simply restructure some finances then consider a secured loan as an alternative to a re-mortgage. The protection of the Consumer Credit Act and also the saving of the upfront fees and the much smaller early repayment charges mean that a secured loan could be much easier to arrange and quite a lot cheaper.